Doulos wrote:The only thing I can say in 'favor' of these chubby-baby NPCs is that they are easily distinguished from real players.

Thats an excellent point. Maybe if those NPCs were concentrated in one city, they could be a different race of peoples or something.

We hope to have NPCs that use the same sprites as players, in fact some in game already do.

We can even equip player armor to them.

As far as being able to tell them apart from players, NPCs names are in blue

We don't have to. We can fake players or monsters as NPCs (eAthena makes it easy if they don't need to move). The client doesn't care if the NPC ID it's talking to maps to a Player or a Monster, or nothing it knows about.

Kage wrote:
We hope to have NPCs that use the same sprites as players, in fact some in game already do.

We can even equip player armor to them.

As far as being able to tell them apart from players, NPCs names are in blue

We don't have to. We can fake players or monsters as NPCs (eAthena makes it easy if they don't need to move). The client doesn't care if the NPC ID it's talking to maps to a Player or a Monster, or nothing it knows about.

Ok, so your suggestion that we try to confuse people?

Even if we could make NPCs have different color, or make players and monsters look like NPC, why would we?